Branch goes on to talk about the “student-athletes” whom he NCAA claims to represent and protect have ended up with virtually no constitutional rights when it comes to NCAA proceedings. The most important point Of the article is that the NCAA, at its heart, is an eminently self-serving organization that cares little about the very student-athletes that it claims to protect.
Branch said it best with this phrase, “For all the outrage, the real scandal is not that students are getting illegally paid or recruited, it’s that two of the noble principles on which the NCAA justifies its and the cynical hoaxes, legalistic confections propagated by the universities so they can exploit the kills and fame of young athletes. The tragedy at the heart of college sports is not that some college athletes are getting paid, but that more of them are not. (3)” In my opinion, the strongest evidence of the exploitation of the athletes is in the legal cases that against NCAA.
They use the deliberately ambiguous “student-athlete” label as a legal shield. Branch defines the term with, “College players were not students at play (which might understate their athletic obligations), nor were they just athletes in college (which might imply they were professionals). That they were high-performance athletes meant hey could be forgiven for not meeting the academic standards of their peers; that they were students meant they did not have to be compensated, ever, for anything more than the cost of their studies. AY’ As an example the case of the widow of Ray Dimension, a football player who died from a head injury playing in Colorado for the Fort Lewis A&M Aggie in the 1 sass. She filed for workmen’s-compensation death benefits. In the end, the Colorado Supreme Court agreed with the school’s decision that he wasn’t eligible for benefits because technically the college claimed not to be in the “football business. Another instance that comes to mind is Wallpaper vs.. Texas Employers Insurance Association.
Kent Wallpaper, a Texas Christian Sincerity running back was paralyzed in a game against the Alabama Crimson Tide. After nine months of paying for his medical bills, UTC refused to pay any more, so the Wallpaper family coped for years on the charity Of others. After a few years, Wallpaper filed a lawsuit for workers compensation. The argument that Wallpaper’s attorneys used was that UTC provided football players with equipment just as a typical employer would. Sadly, the appeals court rejected Wallpaper’s claim for the reason that he was not an employee because he had not paid taxes on financial aid. A series of lawsuits quietly making their way through the courts cast a harsh light on the absurdity of the system-?and threaten to dislodge the foundations on which the NCAA rests( Branch 1 1)” This particular legal case is about using college athletes’ likenesses without paying them for it. On July 21 , 2009, lawyers for De Abandon filed a class-action antitrust suit against the NCAA at the U. S. District Court in San Francisco. Abandon says, “Once you leave your university, one would think your likeness belongs to you.